OAN Staff James Meyers
11:27 AM – Thursday, August 22, 2024
Cryptocurrency hackers made the claim to fame after they broke into fast-food chain McDonald’s official Instagram account. They took advantage of the hack to promote a fake digital currency, running off with $700,000 in stolen money.
A screenshot circulated across the social media showing McDonald’s Instagram page. It revealed that the hackers changed the fast food account’s bio to say: “Sorry mah n–ga you have just been rug pulled by India_X_Kr3w thank you for the $700,000 in Solana.”
The caption, which was visible to the more than 5.1 million Instagram followers of McDonald’s account, included an emoji displaying the flag of India.
McDonald’s commented that it was “aware of an isolated incident that impacted our social media accounts earlier today.”
“We have resolved the issue on those accounts and apologize to our fans for any offensive language posted during that time,” McDonald’s said.
The hackers used a type of scam called a “rug pull,” which is a scam in which creators of a cryptocurrency withdraw funds from a coin’s liquidity pool and disappear. As a result, it leaves investors with tokens that are meaningless.
A “rug pull” is normally executed by creating the fake token and then promoting it on social media and cryptocurrency forums online. Then, the creators build hype around the digital coin and encourage investors to get in on the ground floor before its value skyrockets. When enough liquidity has been gathered by pairing the fake coin with an established cryptocurrency, the creators withdraw the liquidity, causing the value to plummet to zero.
The scammers then delete the social media accounts and delete their online presence, which makes it difficult for investors to track them down so that they can recover their money.
According to the hackers, they targeted the fast-food company’s social media account and used it to promote a fake meme coin known as “GRIMACE” on the Solana network, which is a high-quality blockchain platform designed for decentralized cryptocurrencies.
Grimace is the massive purple character created by McDonald’s for advertising and marketing purposes.
Almost 30 minutes later, the fake token went from zero to $25 million in value before crashing, according to Cryptopolitan.
The posts promoting the fake cryptocurrency were later deleted.
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